As we take our leave, I wonder if I’ll ever see that shameless guy again. At this point, I wouldn’t mind, even if it was only to observe the way he uses his primordial energy. Even now, there are so many things that make me curious about him, in particular, what his primordial energy might do. My best guess is that it has something to do with the multicolored light he used instead of an arrow that managed to pierce the Harvester’s skull.

There was also something about his movements that felt off, too, so maybe that’s part of it as well?

Just more fodder for the enormous pile of questions I already had. I wonder if I’ll still have this many five, ten, or even a hundred years into the system.

Obviously, that depends on whether I can solve the problem of my body modifications clashing with the system given ones. Lissandra estimated a deadline of ten to twenty years, but with three of my new constructs? Probably not as long.

But that is what I’ll continue to do. I’ll just keep running downhill, increasing my speed so I don’t fall, doing everything I can to make sure I don’t stumble along the way.

My first test will be killing Faora before she finishes her tutorial and returns to her planet. Everything I do now, including the custom training and experiments, has been done in preparation for facing her.

Weslin says we should reach the third city in four to seven days if we hurry. He doesn’t seem to be worried about the possible dangers of the floor. With him being the kind of person who reached the fifth floor of Beyond, I’m not that surprised.

In the third city, there’s a portal that Weslin plans to use to get us to the third floor, where a bigger branch of the Primordial Knights can deal with me. Something tells me that he’s impatient to get rid of me, like a hot potato he intends to let someone else handle. But Faora is likely on the third floor, so that’s exactly where I want to go. That’s why I follow through and continue with my planning. I will deal with the problem known as the Primordial Knights later, they’re not all that important at the moment.

My mental training continues as well, and every hour I learn a tiny bit more about my newest skill, and it’s always just a bit more than before. I start thinking that even though I’m normally confident, I may have underestimated myself.

Given a bit more time, I think in this game of rock, paper, scissors, Faora would be the scissors, and I’d be the meteor.

----------------------------------------

During one of our short breaks, Weslin turns to me. “Yo, newbie, I’m getting tired of that bitch face of yours. Just be a man, disable that concentration skill, and talk to me normally.”

I look at him and then glance around us. The space between cities is huge, and I suspect the second floor might be much, much bigger than the first. Even as fast as we’re moving, there are still a few days left until we reach the second city, and a few days beyond that before we make it to the third.

That’s probably why Weslin seems to be getting bored.

I suspect one of the main problems this floor presents is crossing these huge distances while avoiding monsters. Here on this floor, they are...

“You bastard, are you thinking about useless stuff again?!”

I look back at him. “Even without my concentration skill, I don’t talk much, especially not with people I barely know.”

“You talked a bit before.”

“You were giving me a lot of information I didn’t already know, but you stopped doing that, and then you started babbling on about a bunch of useless stuff most of the time.”

“So my adventures from before the tutorial are useless stuff?”

“Maybe I misspoke.” I correct myself a bit.

“You betcha you did, you little shit. Well, I can disable it myself, right?” He takes a step toward me and enters my reach without a speck of worry.

The light of the crystal embedded in the ceiling of this enormous cave, miles above us, shines down and reflects off his bald head.

“You think I can’t do it?” he asks threateningly.

“I think you probably can,” I reply.

“Let’s try then...” he says with a smile, and his primordial void rises around him. Then, in a way I haven’t seen before, it reaches out for me.

Even though I defend and try to stop it, it disables the effect my concentration skill has on my emotions, in what can only be a great display of delicate and precise, if powerful, use of void energy.

Weslin smiles brightly while he waits, as if counting down, “You know, I’ve learned how to deal with guys like you. I can pick out concentration type skills from the unique feeling they give off. Don’t ask me how I do it, maybe I’m truly a genius, but some of the things I can do with void energy no one in the Primordial Knights can understand.”

As he says that, all my other skills activate, but the part of [Focus] that affects my emotions feels distant and out of reach. It’s unlike anything even Professor Feran could do.

Weslin takes a step closer. “What now? Want to punch me?”

“A bit,” I agree. “But do you think my control over myself is so pathetic that I’d do it the moment after you disable my skill?”

I face his eyes until he groans in an annoyed manner and mumbles something about this being a boring mission while he kicks the rock on the ground.

That’s when I channel and unleash a surge of mana at him. It roars through me, moving so fast it ravages my body as I drive it forward with all my strength, sacrificing control for speed.

Even though there isn’t as much of it as there was back then, it still explodes in his direction, just like it did against the Witherclaw during the tournament.

It tears the area around us apart in one huge blast. Debris rains to the ground as I stand unmoving, and the air is filled with a distant hum and the scent of mana.

In the middle of the resulting crater, Weslin still stands, completely untouched and still with his back to me. His primordial void flickers across his skin as he turns his head around.

“Stop fucking polishing your head, it’s blinding me...” I don’t get to finish the sentence because he is suddenly standing in front of me.

I absorb the kinetic energy of his first blow and redirect it through my body, using it to meet his next attack and then reposition. That same feeling of void trying to cut me off from my skill reaches toward me, and I don’t hesitate to compress my mana into a black orb, which I place between us.

The surface of the orb wobbles, and the orb itself elongates and stretches. But then it bounces back into the shape of an orb.

It just fully resisted void energy disruption from someone who’s probably close to a hundred levels higher than me.

Staring into Weslin’s eyes, I grab the orb in my hand and squeeze, letting it seep into my body, where it flows through me, slowly feeds on my mana, and compresses it the same way.

I’ve seen him fighting often enough, so I don’t even bother with ranged attacks. The best chance I have against Weslin is to fight him at melee. Or possibly from a distance with matter-based ranged attacks, but there’s no way I would try that now.

With my suppressed emotions slowly rising within me, I reach him. The field around him flickers with void energy and disrupts my kinetic strikes, but I rely on my body, strengthened by black mana. Honestly, I’m not the greatest at mana based body reinforcement, but with the amount of mana I currently hold, I don’t have to be.

Weslin blocks my punch with his forearm and punches me, sending me staggering back. The skin on the arm I used to block twists like a whirlpool, and flesh, skin, and blood explode as a hole is punched right through me.

Once again, he’s in front of me, delivering another punch, which I partially manage to block. As another hole appears in me, I throw thermal energy at him. It blazes all around us, setting the grass on fire, heating up the dirt, and rising high into the sky in a rush of golden flame.

And he just swings his arm while primordial energy moves around it. As if it were blowing out a candle, the flame around me disappears.

A few more exchanges earn me a few more wounds. His body is ridiculously strong and durable, and even the technique he’s been showing off is great. But he’s still holding back, and I can use that against him.

I gather kinetic energy again and move. This time, as he sends a wave of void energy at me to disrupt it, and I force black mana from my pathways to the surface of my skin. His void energy bounces off it and fails to reach the kinetic energy beneath.

Wraith Dance brings me to his side, and I absorb my inertia, causing him to miss. Then I move again, using the kinetic energy the entire time, and bury my fist into his face with all the power I can gather. It sends a shockwave rippling out around us, so strong it looks like waves spreading through the grass.

Slowly, Weslin turns to me, with my fist still against his face. He is smiling.

“I didn’t expect that,” he says.

I don’t see what happens, but in the next moment, I find myself flying through the air. As if in slow motion, I watch him move toward me.

Not for a moment do I take my eyes off him. I absorb the inertia of my flight while clashing with his new attempts at disruption. I adapt to face them and stop him from interfering with my kinetic energy. I send a pulse upward and push myself toward the ground. As my feet touch the grass, I use Pulsar Stance to avoid three attacks aimed at me.

I release a seal on my heart a slight bit more and push all that heat into the area. And while he deals with that, I push through the golden flames with a Wraith Dance.

Even without [Focus], I feel myself settling into the familiar calm that comes during a fight. I concentrate on all the information I can gather. I keep coming up with ways to fight him. I keep handling the black mana, transferring bits of normal mana that regenerate into kinetic energy before the black mana can take it. I continue to cycle thermal energy through my body, and I keep observing his void energy as I do.

As my fist heads for his rib cage, I send ten pulses of kinetic energy at him, emanating from the front of my fist. All in a fraction of a second, each with a slightly different frequency.

He uses ten similar pulses of void energy that deal with all of them. My fist hits his chest, and I feel the bones beneath crack, but he doesn’t seem to care at all. In fact, his smile grows even brighter.

“How about this?” he says, and before I can even move, he sends a hundred pulses of void energy at me.

They bounce off me. They bounce off each other. Some push away the black mana, some try to contain it. Each one is different. About half push the black mana barrier away, even the one I’ve been using for reinforcement. The rest bounce around inside my body.

When it all stops, the second seal on the Ignition Heart lifts from the strain, and thermal energy floods my body. It forces me to immediately start dealing with it as pain and golden flames fill me.

But Weslin doesn’t give me a pause. He punches the exact spot on my chest that I struck on his, cracking a few of my ribs, then lands another blow in the same place.

I barely absorb the slightest bit of the incoming kinetic energy and dedicate more of my mind to handling the thermal energy.

As pain fills me, my body starts healing rapidly. The wounds he caused before close in moments, and even the broken bones begin restoring themselves.

In an effort to counter Weslin, I let some of the thermal energy reach my skin, forcing him to deal with it to continue his assault. At the same time, I shape some of the black mana in my body into a javelin and hurl it into the distance, because I can’t handle both it and this amount of thermal energy at once.

Weslin swings his arm again, the flames against me die off, he blocks my attack, endures another, then hits my chest again in exactly the same spot, sending more ripples of void energy piercing into my body.

The third seal around the Ignition Heart lifts just the slightest bit.

The flames surrounding me increase tenfold in a blink, causing Weslin to stagger back and cross his arms in front of him to fend it off. Void energy surges around him, and he takes no damage.

Even now, he moves closer and swings his arm to make the flames die out, and they do. But a moment later, they return, even bigger and more intense than before.

The air crackles with heat, and my skin starts melting and regenerating at an insane speed.

Looking at it, Weslin smiles. “That was almost too easy. I could probably just walk away and let you die from this, right? Damn, man, I really gotta show you at least a bit of how to deal with void energy.” He shakes his head.

He swings his arm again, and void energy gathers, surrounding us in a huge loop. It spins around both of us, with void energy flowing inside it. The loop then starts shrinking and spinning faster, and the faster it spins, the stronger its disrupting effect becomes. Gradually, the flames around me die off.

Using the small window of time that gives me, I work as quickly as I can on the Ignition Heart, placing the slightly lifted third seal back in place. As I do, I come to realize that it had lifted even less than I thought, just the tiniest bit.

The seal falls back into place. Then the second. The loop of void energy finally disappears.

My normal mana starts filling me again, and my constructs reactivate themselves. I throw myself onto the ground, resting on my back and breathing heavily. My body is perfectly healed, but the pain makes me feel like my head is going to explode and my body is going to melt.

I move a little and let out a long, painful groan as I do. I turn my head to Weslin, who’s still sitting nearby and observing me with curiosity. He’s barely taken any damage.

“Is it possible to enter all of Beyond’s floors without bothering with the quests? Just by buying the right stuff or passing through portals?”

“Holy hell, man.”

“Just answer my question, damn it,” I groan.

“Maybe if you didn’t look like you were about to die, I would.”

“Fuck you.”

At that, he smiles. “Bitch.”

Only then does he move a bit closer and answer. “It’s only the second and third floors you can enter so easily. Getting to the fourth is much more complicated.”

“Not so fucking difficult to answer, right?” In the middle of that sentence, I groan from the pain again and close my eyes.

He kicks at the ground, and bits of dirt and small rocks hit my face.

Then I spit some of the grass from my mouth and continue asking questions to distract myself from the pain.